Literary and Art Editor of the New York Tribune
THE etchings of Fortuny make an inviting theme, inviting in itself and doubly sympathetic because it provokes talk about Fortuny. I have always had a weakness for that endearing personality and I cannot, for the life of me, go with foot-rule and a spirit of cold analysis through the twenty-five or thirty plates—twenty-nine, to be exact—recorded in the useful compendium of Beraldi. You cannot be pedantic about an artist whose work has meant to you an early enthusiasm and a lifelong sense of gaiety and brilliance. The first work of art I ever yearned to possess was a drawing by Fortuny. I did not get it into my hands. The spell faded, but it was revived, and long afterward it involved me in an enchanting task. In Paris, one summer, the late Philip Gilbert Hamerton asked me to write a memoir of Fortuny and for two years I spent a good deal of my leisure going hither and yon, collecting material. The book never got itself written, for reasons which I found both pathetic and comic. Too much of the “material” aforesaid proved too heart-breakingly expensive. Mr. Hamerton and I and his London publisher, the late Mr. Seeley, ruefully concluded as we counted up the figures, that, humorously speaking, ruin stared us in the face. We turned to other things.
Fortuny. Arab watching beside the Dead Body of his Friend
(Beraldi No. 1)
Size of the original etching, 7½ × 15¼ inches
Fortuny. Idyll
(Beraldi No. 4)
Size of the original etching, 7⅝ × 5½ inches
That, as I have said, was years ago, but every now and then I go back to Fortuny, for old sake’s sake if for no other reason, though he was, of course, a remarkable artist to whom one would be bound, anyway, frequently to return. As a matter of fact, his genius has needed, of late, to be restored to the public consciousness. When the Impressionists came in, Fortuny, or perhaps I should more specifically say, the hypothesis for which he stood, went out. One of the results of my understanding with Mr. Hamerton was a series of visits to the palazzo in Venice which is still the home of Fortuny’s family, and there you found a contrast that was full of meaning. On the piano nobile Fortuny’s art held its own in numerous unfinished pictures, sketches, and the like. But, up-stairs, in his son’s studio, all was changed. When young Marianito sought inspiration as a painter, he did not follow in his father’s footsteps, but went to Munich, and on his walls I saw huge canvases illustrating Wagnerian motives in a huge and splashy manner, strongly suggestive of Franz Stuck and his followers. I confess that at this distance of time I do not recall very accurately just what they were all about; but I can remember as though it were yesterday how extremely different they were from the paintings down-stairs. Of course no one could blame Marianito. An artist must seek salvation in his own way. But it is impossible not to feel a certain indignation over the ignorance of those who have tried to wave Fortuny aside as a painter of bric-a-brac.
We saw too much of that sort of thing when the works of Sorolla and Zuloaga were shown at the Hispanic Museum and people went into hysterics over them, talking especially about how the first of these painters was rejuvenating Spanish art. I used to hear such talk in Madrid, some fifteen years ago, amongst the younger men who were even then hailing Sorolla as a pioneer. They were right, and it is right, as I have argued elsewhere, to recognize in this painter’s work an influence of the highest value to the modern Spanish school. But there were great men before Agamemnon, and it is stupid to ignore what was done for Spanish painting by Fortuny long before any one ever heard of Sorolla. I have great respect and plenty of admiration for that accomplished technician, and yet I think that he himself, if pressed in the matter, would cheerfully admit that nothing he ever painted could quite touch the portrait in the Metropolitan Museum, A Spanish Lady, which Fortuny painted in 1865. Outside of France that was not a particularly good year amongst painters, but Fortuny, then twenty-seven years old, was proving himself not unworthy of Velasquez. He was drawing with mastery and he was painting blacks with amazing skill and taste, with amazing sensitiveness to the beauties lying entangled in one of the most difficult of a colorist’s problems. Indeed, I may note in passing that this picture alone would show Fortuny to have enforced lessons in tone which no Spaniard since his time, not even the prodigiously clever Sorolla, has begun to commence to prepare to equal.